Went into this contest with the bottom 11el 6M antenna still broken.   The top one seems to work fine and in the few and far between Es openings we had in May it did really well. Still miss that extra 3db on long haul tropo but with Es it doesn’t seem to matter as much.  Found the DE open last year and just have not gotten the right day to take that monster down and repair it. The wind has been strong just about every weekend and the few weekends that it wasn’t I was tied up with other things. The wind has also loosened up multiple insulators in the area and the big Thunder storms with 70 MPH winds recorded over Memorial Day weekend put a really bad one with an S9 buzz right in line with W1/W2 and another bad one to the southwest towards TX and AZ. Both of these are strong all the way up to 222MHz! I hunted these down right away but the power company was not able to fix them in time for the contest.  I know it’s hard to imagine, but it seems that it was just not their top priority to have these fixed in time for the contest!

Did get the 902 antenna repaired and back up in a 20MPH wind and even handling the 18’ boom at 100 feet was a struggle. Unknown to me going into the contest the 7el 6M at 30 feet fixed to W1/W2 was not playing well, yet still showed a normal SWR. After the contest I found that the SWR was lying to me since a cable connection had become toasted due to high SWR at the antenna. Of course the low antennas don’t hear the buzz as much as the high ones do.  Luckily the 5el at 20 feet was playing well and became my go-to antenna when the band was crowded and my noise blanker was in an almost constant whine. So my apologies if I didn’t hear you, the noise was horrific.    

Saturday there were multiple ES openings but no real huge ones until Sunday morning. Saturday the pickings on 2M and above were also lean since everyone seemed to be on 6M waiting for the spotty and region specific openings. Conditions above 432 were terrible and didn’t really improve that much on Sunday. I did manage a few 6M Qs to Eu and the Caribbean on Saturday but did not get any on Sunday. By the time I finished my morning WSJT skeds on Sunday 6M was already open to W1/W2 and the wind was starting up to keep blowing hard all day.  I left my CQ frequency whenever possible to run the bands with folks, and lost it many times in the process. The Es was amazing and at one point I worked California and the Maritimes within a few minutes of each other!  

But by 11AM Sunday 6M died here and didn’t really come back alive until almost 5PM. The space between was really tough going as nobody wanted to leave 6M and I could not hear the weak ones out 200-300 miles on tropo well in several directions due to the cracking insulators in the wind.  Calling on 2M produced a few here and there but the 90 degree temps during the day really suppressed the tropo.  It was almost like a January contest!  

Many stations would tell me about the DX they just worked on 6M, often volunteering specific information. I know they mean well but I wish they wouldn’t. While I would love to work HI again (some locals did) I don’t think waiting in a pileup with low power helps my score when I’m already running a pileup and getting new mults. Each DX station is just another 6M Q and grid in the contest. And now that you’ve spotted him for me, as a single OP I really shouldn’t go work him anyway.   

Of course the Es came back just as it was time to really concentrate on 2M and above. I would call CQ for a while on 6 until the pileup died (knowing I wasn’t as loud as I should have been) then go up and chase stations through the bands for a while. It was tough ignoring 6M in the last few hours but I got a lot more mults working the other bands than concentrating on “worked all FN42” through the insulator buzz.  If we went to do 6M we had to QSY well over 250. Even then we would often get QRM when stations would call us while we were trying to complete a weak tropo contact. And while the rovers wanted to get a few last Qs or Grids in with me in the last half hour, I decided it was in my better interest to run the total up another 50 Qs working the W1/W2 pileup on the low antenna.   

No 2M Es, no AU and darn poor tropo, but a good contest none the less.